One thing that works for me
1) I would go through and disable or turn off all of the little items that are running in your taskbar that you can spare. This includes virus protection, Instant messengers, and fancy screensavers. This should free up processor time, if that's the issue.
2) Clean out your temporary internet files folder, and delete any cookies you don't KNOW that you need.
3) I would also try tweaking down the quality settings on the game and see if the problem goes away.
4) More likely, I think the problem might be related to memory and disk fragmentation. (If you don't know what fragmentation is, basically it happens when your computer tries to save a file and can't save it all in one place. It saves bits of it where it can and the file takes longer to access because all of the bits are scattered and have to be reassembled to present them to you. Here's a quote on the subject from some guys that sell software to fix the problem: "Disk fragmentation cuts directly across the integrity of your system. Files fragmented into 200 pieces take 200 times longer to access. Files shattered into 200,000 pieces will take 200,000 times longer, and so on... And, that's just one computer and one file! ") I would run the defragmenter built into your system and see if that takes care of the problem.
I think your issue won't be fixed by just running defrag, though. Your Windows system is designed to use part of the hard drive space as an extenstion to the memory in the system. It takes things out of memory and saves them to a file, and the size of that file grows and shrinks as your system's memory needs change. That file can get fragmented over time just like any other file that is saved fairly often. System performance takes a big hit when this memory pagefile is fragmented because the system has to wait to access things in memory.
So, here's what I would do:
- Right click on the my computer icon and click properties on the popup menu
- Click on the advanced tab of the window that pops up
- Click on the Performance Settings button
- Click on the advanced tab of the window that pops up
- Click on the change button in the Virtual Memory pane at the bottom of the window
- Write down the sizes and locations of your pagefiles so you can restore them later
- Click on the button that says no paging file. This will temporarily delete that pagefile so you can rebuild it.
- Click OK and/or apply on all of the windows that you just opened to apply the settings
- Reboot if it asks you to. Click OK if it gives you an error message about not having a pagefile
- run your defragmenter again following the reboot. This will consolidate all of that free space that you just freed up by deleting the pagefile.
- Once defrag finishes, run it again.
- After it finishes the second time, reverse the changes you made to the pagefile settings, and reboot.
By going through that process you will have defragmented your pagefile as best you can, and you should see some performance improvement.
If you do all of these, I think that will stop the dropped frames.
- Freed
Click "Direct 3D" settings in the white extended window, and make sure the Mipmap detail level is set to "high peformance". Then click "OpenGL Settings" in the white extended window and make sure Vertical Sync is set to "Always Off".